Lil’ Debi: Easy Installer for Debian on Android

Alpha test our new app, Lil’ Debi. It builds up a whole Debian chroot on your phone entirely using debootstrap. You choose the release, mirror, and size of the disk image, and away it goes. It could take up to an hour, then its done. Then it has a simple chroot manager that mounts and unmounts things, and starts/stops sshd if you have it installed. You can also then use ‘apt-get’ to install any package that is released for ARM processors. This includes things like GPG, Tor, TraceRouteTCP and other security and crypto tools.

27 comments for “Lil’ Debi: Easy Installer for Debian on Android”

One thing I forgot to mention is that a 256 MB image doesn’t give you much room to install things. I think the default should probably be closer to 600MB, if you want to have a full-featured environment, including things like python, sshd, etc.

Thanks for the heads up. We’ve updated the posting to point to the right location. You can grab our automated build-bot created updates at https://guardianproject.info/builds/lildebi/. We’ll post alpha builds to GitHub once we get to a good set of stable Debian tools.

As Derek said, the auto-builds are the best thing right now. We’re working on getting our first alpha into the Marketplace, so things are moving to fast for regular “release” builds. That said, the builds right now are pretty well tested on a couple of phones. Please test and let us know what works and what doesn’t so we can make it better!

You’ll need an ARM binary since the CPU on all Android devices is an ARM. If you have the source, you could compile for Debian/armeabi. As for truecrypt, another thing you’ll have to look out for is whether the kernel has the support for dm-crypt, loopback, ext2 filesystem, etc. that you might need. This is just a Debian chroot, the kernel and modules are still the Android ones.

While not as active as some of our other projects, it’s definitely something that we’re going to keep pushing forward – hopefully to a release in the Market eventually. May we ask what hardware and OS you’re running on, just for reference?

The lildebi app I installed doesn’t show up in Droidwall’s list of apps. In order to get online with it, I would have to disable the firewall. I don’t want to have to allow everything to access the network just in order to get the debian install working.

Is this project still maintained? The last build I saw was from mid-July, 2011.

I have been running LilDebi on my Pandigital Novel (white) 7″ tablet for about 2 days and so far have liked it well. I was having problems with the image creator (always said I should manually fsck the .img’s and never booted them) so I took an image from my Nokia N800 tablet chroot and renamed it from ‘debian-squeeze.img.ext2’ to debian.img and it has worked well enough so far. I have been able to create working wav files with the csound compiler in seconds. I will try to render with aqsis later and will let you know how it goes. By the way I am running CyanogenMod 6.x on my tablet.

I found your program through the F-Droid repository, where it has an icon featuring the snack cake logo. Is this the official logo, and your doing? If so, is this legal?

It’s flaky on install size for the image…doesn’t like certain numbers…I haven’t been able to go over 2000 MB…once you install tightvncserver and lxde there isn’t much space left so I prefer a larger debian.img…also it’s difficult to shutdown properly…I always have processes left running which causes me to shut it down improperly and loose data and ruin my image because it fails to boot :/

i extract debian.img file on sdcard and install Lil’Debi (apk) .
But it shows error like “Image not configured”
The mount point ‘/data/debian’ does not exists!
When i click on Configure Image ,error occured
./configure-downloaded-image.sh No such file or directory

Exactly the same problem here with Cyanogenmod. Unpacked 600Mb debian-squeeze.img onto the SD card. The APK is installed, but when clicking Configure Image “mount point /debian doesn’t exist”. As root, I tried to create /debian but can’t as its a read only file system.